from the I-hate-competition dept

T-Mobile's loopy idea to try and treat wireless subscribers better (well, if you exclude their attacks on the EFF and net neutrality) has been a great thing for American consumers and wireless sector competition. Thanks to more consumer-friendly policies, T-Mobile has been adding more subscribers per quarter than any other major carrier for several years running. This added competitive pressure recently resulted in both AT&T and Verizon being forced to bring back the unlimited data plans the companies had been insisting for years consumers didn't actually want.

The problem, if you're a wireless carrier or investor, is that AT&T and Verizon are making slightly less money now that they're unable to sock consumers with restrictive caps and overage fees. In fact, wireless sector revenues dipped slightly in the first quarter for the first time in seventeen years, as T-Mobile competition forced carriers to engage in a little more than theatrical non-price competition. Keep in mind these companies are still making some fairly-incredible profits, and their expansion into areas like smart cities and the IOT give them ample opportunity for new revenue streams.

But unlimited data plans returned at the start of the year, and Wall Street firms still can't quite let go of the fact that these industry giants might just have to make a little less money. Cowen and Company Equity Research analyst Colby Synesael simply isn't very happy about this whole competition thing:

"The first quarter of unlimited for all four carriers left much to be desired. Both AT&T and Verizon incurred postpaid losses for the first time on record, a trend that could continue. Verizon specifically had its worst quarter in recent memory with a lackluster performance on nearly all sub metrics. Even T-Mobile’s guidance included a ‘less great’ postpaid net add increase of just +250,000. Combined with continued pricing pressure, AT&T and Verizon are pivoting to new avenues of growth such as Mexico, content, media, IoT and 5G, all of which can’t come soon enough."

Mike McCormack of Jefferies shares similar worries about how the elimination of often-arbitrary usage caps and overage fees means precious wireless industry giants now have to more seriously compete:

"The resurgence of unlimited plans is likely to delay more meaningful ARPU stabilization for multiple quarters due to the loss of overages and plan rightsizing. Impacts to ARPU on an incremental basis (i.e. for new subscribers) will depend on the number of accompanying lines activated. Our analysis suggests a willingness to use price with the hopes that multiline subscribers will churn less frequently. The move to unlimited also diminishes the ability to monetize growing data usage, removing an important lever of growth."

Poor darlings, having to actually compete on price and listen to consumers!

But worry not. Wall Street and these wireless companies have an ingenious solution to the sudden influx of T-Mobile competition: reduce competition through additional sector mergers and acquisitions. Wall Street analysts have been relentlessly fanning the flames of a Sprint acquisition of T-Mobile, which would eliminate one of four major competitors in the space. Sprint owner Softbank has been buttering up the Trump administration for much of the year in the hopes he'll approve a deal that was blocked by regulators in 2014 because it would have reduced competition.

Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure spent this week insisting such a union would create "enormous" synergies, and the fusion of the two companies would let the merged company battle more effectively with the likes of AT&T and Verizon Wireless. Granted if you've spent five minutes with a history textbook (especially one governing the telecom sector), you'll find that these megamergers almost always kill jobs, reduce overall competition, and reduce incentive for consumer service and network improvements. Meaning that if this merger is approved, bringing back unpopular usage caps and overage fees will be a top priority.

Re: Idiots...

That's exactly what they think. The idea is that growing consumption of media on smartphones and tablets via cellular connections will lead to more overages, thus increasing revenue. And if all the major telcos have limited plans with overage fees, consumers would have nowhere to flee to. Thus ensuring they stay and pay the overage fees.

Re: Idiots...

That it would result in the Wireless Carriers being simple rentier and thus getting the Free Lunch of exponential growth of rapidly growing small companies with the risk reduction of larger companies.

But bankers and stock traders of all people should know that it doesn't work that way. If something is sure the rate of return is low because it is pretty much guaranteed that you won't lose money on them. If something is risky the rate of return is higher because it has to justify the risk for the investment.

When the people who should be most dedicated to the "let the market decide" mantra hate it when the market actually gets to decide, that's when you know that capitalism, in its current form, is utter bullshit.

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To me, it seems that most people screaming about how we need a return to or more capitalism or less regulation for less regulation's sake are either unwilling to admit or unaware that a purely capitalistic, completely unregulated economy is an unstable equilibrium. Once one business gets ahead, it has an inherent advantage that can be abused to get more ahead and sooner or later you end up with completely noncompetitive monopolies everywhere, arguably the opposite of capitalism since there is zero competition. You need certain kinds of regulation just to keep it capitalistic.

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No, HUMANS strive to achieve monopoly, not any *ism of the day. *ism's are just ideological frameworks. If people were "good" then it does not matter what framework you create, its going to work out. But people are "evil" therefore the best framework is the one that hampers our evil, own it all, take it all, fuck the rest or pay off the rest attitudes we have about economy.

Capitalism/Free-Market just has no "explicit" protections against it.Of course, there are a lot of lost sheep that think "regulation" is a cure for that, and it is not either. You actually trade a lesser evil for a greater evil.

It is easier to fight a monopoly in a Capitalist/Free-Market environment than it is to fight a monopoly established in a Capitalist/Regulatory Capture market which is what we currently have.

If you don't like that, then go and buy your politician back from the business lobbies. Good luck with that!

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"Is it though?"

Yes, it really is. Government blessed monopolies get the backing of law enforcement and the courts. You cannot fight against them because the business just says, hey I am following the regulations, tell Mr. Pissant off for us. Also, make sure those regulations prevent Mr. Pissant from easily becoming a competitor, their values might steal our customers from us!

"Because fighting them through free-market pressures was working so well?"

It was because "Anti-Trust/Monopoly Regulation" was failing. So the order of the day was guess what?"more regulation"How genius that was... get more of what already failed! Reminds me of the we don't spend enough on Education bullshit, completely ignoring the "actual" problem!

If the first regulations we had on the books did not work then why should we ask for more? In what sane world does asking for more of what failed create a better solution? None that I have ever experienced! The reason why those regulations failed was because of corruption. These regulations are corrupt to. The next regulations will be corrupt as well.

We are going to be here at TD for the rest of your lives being told by people like me, that calls for regulation are the cause of this problem.

How about we get RID of the new crap, go back and just enforce the original "far more reasonable" crap?

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"If the first regulations we had on the books did not work then why should we ask for more? In what sane world does asking for more of what failed create a better solution?"

It's not "more" of something being asked for, it's a different version of something. And if we applied that logic anywhere else, one can see how absurd it is. It doesn't follow that just because one instance of something failed that all other instances will fail. I understand that it makes sense to you because you believe that they would both fail because the problem is inherent to the underlying nature of the institution. But you have yet to prove that, and you have yet to prove that free market solutions are likely do any better.

And no one here is disagreeing that there aren't terrible laws on the books which have allowed government sanctioned regulatory capture; just look at how much the site and people here complain about copyright, patents, and trademark law (all government granted monopolies).

For your "all regulations are bad" thesis to work, you'd need to actually show that actually all of them are. But if you actually care to do some research or are open to being provided examples, I'm sure we can find plenty of cases where a regulation was a resounding success where the previous unregulated situation has resulted in a terrible situation.

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Ummmm.... Bell was a government regulated monopoly. If you're one of those who still have a landline, the landline is highly regulated. Especially of you're in one of those small areas that was/is served by a non-Bell landline company. If I were to get a landline, my local calling area would be the two towns my carrier serves. I'd have to pay extra- a lot extra- to include the town next door where my kid's school is. They're Verizon, a Bell Baby. Ten years ago when I last set up a land line the phone company rep asked if I wanted a party line! NY State then, and probably still does, requires that a party line be offered to people.

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> Is it though? Is that why the railroads and Bell had > to be broken up by the government? Because fighting > them through free-market pressures was working so well?

I'm sure that with a moment's reflection you'll remember that Bell was a *creation* of the Federal Government and their monopoly was the result of a bargain that the feds made early on--that Bell would wire every (or nearly) every community in exchange for a government guaranteed monopoly. In exchange they were only allowed to charge cost + $SOME percentage (which is why they built some AWESOME switching systems in nuclear hardened buildings) and were supposed to charge every person the same rate, but could charge businesses more.

The lawsuit that started down the road to the breakup was filed by MCI, another private company, that AT&T (Bell) was preventing from making local interconnects.

The Railroads were a similar story--the USG helped *certain* railroads grow by using Eminent Domain, and then taking action when it was politically more expedient.

This is a common thread that runs through most "monopoly" cases. Microsoft isn't that much less of a monopoly today than it was 20 years ago, but today they have lobbyists, and Gates gives money to left wing charities, so they get a pass (well, that and everyone's focus is on smartphones and tablets where MS is getting their asses kicked. And where Goggle, who lurves them some big government connections, is massively dominant).

The one problem with assuming that Government will protect you from the big bad market is that WHO IS PROTECTING YOU FROM THE GOVERNMENT? Look at this last election where you had two horribly corrupt people at the top of the ticket (let's set aside which one was worse, both are massively corrupt) and two loons at the bottom (one arrested on a felony charge during the campaign).

The market IS in fact self-correcting if you can keep government far enough away. Many times it is the government (at the local, state or federal level) that either grant monopolies (look at Cable companies--they were mostly granted city/regional monopolies in the 70s and 80s, and then got conglomerated into a couple of big companies later.

Local, state and federal governments, usually at the behest of lobbyists, also raise barriers to competition (barriers to entry).

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> "Let's sweet aside which one was worse"?

How about let's not, because Trump is so obviously worse that I don't even know where to begin. I don't see Hillary Clinton saying that there are "lots of fine people" at Nazi rallies. "Nazis are bad and Hitler is evil" was literally the last thing that everyone agreed upon. Of course each party in such an incredibly divided political landscape as the one we have now is going to say that the other party's candidate is a threat to national security, but it takes a special kind of awful to have your own chief of staff call you a "Fucking moron", or to have sitting senators from your own party who endorsed your campaign opine that you seem to "lack the desire to be competent."

"The resurgence of unlimited plans is likely to delay more meaningful ARPU stabilization for multiple quarters due to the loss of overages and plan rightsizing. "

I had to translate from market drone to English, but a Google search tells me that ARPU is revenue per user, and rightsizing means to "convert (something) to an appropriate or optimum size."

So, this is a bad thin.? Because in the process of converting the plans to something appropriate for the user and not being able to screw them on overcharging, it will take some time for the average to be predictable enough. Not indefinitely, but for a few quarters in the near future.

Only in the minds of these people would this be a bad thing, especially since the underlying implication there would be that in the long term this means that the ARPU would be stable. It's just not quickly enough for people who don't see past the next quarter, so the preference is to make the experience worse and more expensive for end users. That says it all, really.

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It probably refers to the general inefficiencies of users not being able to get a plan that IS the "right size". Either their plan is too small and they're hit with overage fees, or their plan is too large and they are pay a large amount upfront. Either way, the company wins. For them "the right size" are where plans are crafted on the right thresholds to make a smaller plan appear adequate, but due to variance month to month, often isn't. I'm sure they do lots of statistics to craft those thresholds.

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Yeah, blame the users for the greedy practices of the corp - nice.

Either way the corp wins - yes, this is true. For them, the right sizes are the ones that return the greatest profit and they have nothing to do with the wellbeing of their customers. This short term outlook has bitten greedy corps in the past and they do not seem to learn from it. Short term profits outweigh long term planning - I think they drill this into MBAs.

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That highlights a good point about their sinister double meaning. Who is it the right size for? The customer for getting everything they want without unneeded cruft or being nickel and dimed for 'good to haves' that make them not worth taking? Or for the corporation to milk out as much profit per customer as possible?

The perfect symbol "I got mine already"

Wall Streets hates it when the ISPs actually *gasp* have to spend money investing in infrastructure.

And yet most Wall Street trading is done by bots these days in split seconds. Bots that depend on... high speed Internet to give them the maximum advantage over the competition.

And of course being centered in NYC, Wall Street tends to have a bit more competition than the rest of the country to drive ISPs to be more likely to give them high speed internet connections (it's not perfect yes, but it's way better than many parts of the country).

Re: The perfect symbol "I got mine already"

"And yet most Wall Street trading is done by bots these days in split seconds. Bots that depend on... high speed Internet to give them the maximum advantage over the competition."

Infrastructure they do not share with the rest of the world. The slower you are, the faster they are.

There is a reason for why the rich want to stockpile riches and resources. It's not just about having more. It's about having MORE than others. Because if you have more, then they get less, which means you get a bigger say and a lot of people LIKE having a say, especially when that say is bigger and louder than others!

Revenue increases

This is actually not a telecom specific thing, as much as it is a stupid capitalism thing. The financial industry seems to think that corporations can sustainably grow indefinitely, meaning profit margins always increase over last years. That is just insane. There is always a topping out, where growth levels off, and that is OK. But American Capitalism dictates that if you aren't growing, then you are failing, even if the company is profitable.

Anecdotally: I worked for many years for a big-box retailer, from stockboy to manager. As a manager, we got reports *daily* showing daily, weekly, monthly, yearly profitability and increases over last year. Each department was expected to maintain a 3% increase over last year. Same market. No real reason to expect growth, you just were expected to pull extra profits out of your ass. Push higher margin items, run loss leader specials, any underhanded thing that would wring out more profit. Really put a bad taste in my mouth.

Re: Revenue increases

Some competition is good, but some is bad?

"T-Mobile's loopy idea to try and treat wireless subscribers better (well, if you exclude their attacks on the EFF and net neutrality) has been a great thing for American consumers and wireless sector competition."

This leading sentence perplexes me. A general premise of this article is that competition is good for the consumer. Yet in the first sentence of said article you imply that Net Neutrality is bad. As a Libertarian leaning citizen myself, I continue to be torn on the Net Neutrality issue.

HOWEVER - Make no mistake - Net Neutrality is REGULATION, which in effect can have a very negative impact on competition.

Seems as though this leading sentence is as contradictory as it could get.

Re: Some competition is good, but some is bad?

We have no competition between the carriers beyond who can screw consumers more. Without net neutrality, they would have yet another thing to nickel and dime customers with to make Wall Street happy.

Oh you want Facebook to load in under 30 minutes?Just pay our FB fastlane fee, which we also charge FB.

Want your tweets quickly?Just pay our Twitter fee.

If they have a chance to make more money, they will try to make more money. Consumers are just things they sometimes trade with each other, to be milked for everything possible while spending as little to deliver service to.

All regulation isn't bad, or would you like them to bring those peanut butter factories that killed people back online because they dodged the regulations to make sure people didn't die from tainted products?

Re: Some competition is good, but some is bad?

Re: Some competition is good, but some is bad?

But Net Neutrality, which it may theoretically hamper competition between ISP's (which currently seem inclined to go out of their way not to compete with each other), it's absolutely necessary to ensure healthy competition between companies using the internet to do business. If there actually WERE competition between ISP's, having Net Neutrality as an enforced regulation might not be necessary as any ISP engaging in practices that would be seen as a violation of net neutrality would risk losing customers. But that only works if people have an option to switch which ISP they use, but a lot of people don't have an option. And in this day and age, choosing not to have ANY ISP is not an option for many people.

Ideals about personal liberty are nice, but we must all fall back on pragmatism at some point. An ideal is not a proof that if we just stuck to it, everything would turn out all right. It's only useful as a guiding force that we can strive towards when it makes sense. But if sticking to an ideal leads to a worse outcome than not sticking to it in a particular instance, I'd say we should choose to deviate from it.

It's much the same in board games like chess. You have these ideals like "strive for material advantage", "keep pieces active and threatening many squares", "control the center". But some times the best move is to trap in your own bishop and sacrifice your queen because all that matters is checkmating the king.

Re: Some competition is good, but some is bad?

Net Neutrality regulations are a necessary countermeasure to treat symptoms of other market dysfunction. Ideally, we would not need Net Neutrality because companies that behave non-neutrally would see their subscribers switch (with no early termination fee!) to someone who contractually committed to behave neutrally. In practice, far too many subscribers have no chance to switch at all, much less switch to a provider who will even give a PR commitment to behaving more neutrally than their competition. Getting a contractual commitment is unheard of, as far as I know.

The libertarian resolution to this is that, if Net Neutrality should not be around, then neither should the extensive regulations that make it de facto impossible for new companies to enter the market and offer Neutral service. The extensive difficulties of Google Fiber rollouts show just how hard it is to enter the market, even with massive resources and public support. Until those regulations get abolished (and no one seriously expects that to happen any time soon), Net Neutrality is a workaround to limit the damage caused by those other regulations.

Re: Some competition is good, but some is bad?

Regulation is how government protects the people from the corporations. Under no sane circumstances can you say regulation is bad without also being one who profits at the expense of the majority of the people, thanks to said regulations. The "free market", without regulation, would oppress the populace through slave wages and exterminate the middle class. We don't need more of that, thank you very much.

Re: Re: Some competition is good, but some is bad?

Some regulations are outdated or needlessly restrictive -- for example, the OMB just got around to scrapping its requirement for Y2K compliance reports today.

Some regulations, like some laws, really are bad.

What's foolish is to extrapolate from that that regulations are bad instead of some regulations are bad.

That seems very, very obvious to me -- obviously some regulations are good, such as those banning child labor, or forbidding businesses from locking their workers in, or preventing doctors from practicing medicine without a license. Or, say, banning the use of leaded paint.

But there are some people who take a baffling, absolutist position that because some regulations are bad, that means all regulations are bad. Which of course doesn't follow logically at all.

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"But there are some people who take a baffling, absolutist position that because some regulations are bad, that means all regulations are bad. Which of course doesn't follow logically at all."

And there are some people that "say" they they understand that bad regulations exist but spend time and energy trashing those they hate while doing nothing about the bad regulations. Yes, you seem to have a solid grasp of logic. That and that you do not even use the word Regulation in proper context.

I have to use the word regulation improperly because few of you here actually KNOWS what it really means.

Regulation as an idea is neither good nor bad. What makes it bad is the cognitive dissonance you hold in regards to the term.

For people like you and TD here is the general mindset.

Regluation = Laws that benefit the consumer more than the business, even in cases where they are a NET bad for everyone.DeRegulation = Laws the benefit the business more than the consumer, even in cases where they are a net good for everyone.

The real problem is that you constantly take my stance that regulation "in general" is bad which is true, as meaning "all regulation is bad" which is a lie. I have already made multiple post describing that I am generally favorable to Anti-Trust and Anti-Monopoly regulations. So obviously I cannot be 100% against all regulation.

But, you will be spewing the same lie again next time. Won't you?

You remind me of the admonition about spreading perls of wisdom before swine, they trample them underfoot and turn against you.

You deserve Trump as you have helped to create the environment where a person like Trump will grow. You do not even understand why and like a rabid animal you bite the hand that feeds you!